The problem is the more serious episodes. You can have a bunch of fairly one-note characters as long as they have dynamics that provide good comedic possibilities and you can take advantage of that. I will say that there’s nothing wrong with that for a comedic work. Most of them are used for one or two jokes and that’s pretty much it. Gintama has a large cast of reoccurring characters, but very little in terms of complex ones.
GINTAMA SEASON 1 GAP FULL
I will give the series full credit for having some surprisingly clever deconstructions here and there, particularly when it comes to its treatment of trans-gendered characters. There are times when the randomness can work and there are some points where they parody something competently instead of just making reference to it but they’re few and far between. For example, there’s a running gag about one of the characters eating too much mayonnaise which is funny because… if he ate that much mayo in reality he’d weigh two hundred kilos and have to get around with a motorised scooter? There are two characters who pretty much exist for stalker jokes and there’s another running joke about Katsura getting annoyed by people calling him the wrong thing. The trouble is, a lot of it really isn’t funny. There are also a lot of bits where the characters will make loud references to some other piece of media and there are some other random bits of humour. A lot of it is pretty puerile humour where someone defecates in their pants, or someone’s anus bleeds or where the punchline is something involving testicles. Now that we’ve been over that, let’s talk a bit about the comedy in this series that is, mostly, comedic. Some episodes deal very much with continuity as being super important, others follow the more fast and loose route where there’s a progression but the details aren’t important and there are other episodes that don’t fit into any kind of continuity and will never be mentioned again after they’re over. The problem with Gintama is that it does all three. The third is to toss continuity out the window completely, like Galaxy Angel. The second is to have a basic progression from one episode to the next but the details aren’t that important. The first is having a strict, coherent continuity where everything matters. There are three basic ways to do continuity. The tone isn’t the only thing that has problems with consistency, there’s also the continuity. Sure, that was way over the series’ head too, but there wasn’t such a radical tonal problem. It’s worse than that Captain Planet episode that dealt with AIDS. There is quite literally no way to make that transition so that it isn’t painfully awkward and completely disrespectful to the serious issue. You can’t segue from jokes about testicles and bloody rectums into a story about an underground city where children are sold to be raised as sex slaves. Most of the episodes are highly random and intended for humour but when they get to the more story heavy arcs things take a huge shift into serious territory, sometimes including really heavy topics like sex trafficking, and it creates a huge tonal clash between episodes. Let’s begin by looking at the problems with the series, shall we? By far the biggest issue is that the writing aesthetic is horribly inconsistent. Hijinks ensue as this group and the people around them get into shenanigans. His crew consists of a youngster named Shinpachi, an Amanto girl named Kagura who possesses super strength and is highly vulnerable to sunlight, and a giant dog named Sadaharu, our cute character who requires ear scritches and belly rubs. Although that largely consists of him doing nothing. In this world a samurai named Gintoki works by, in theory, doing odd jobs. Samurai are no longer allowed to carry swords except for a few who work for the government or who have wealth and connections. The basic setup is that the world has been conquered by aliens, referred to in Gintama as “Amanto” and the government is still subservient to them.
There are some loosely connected arcs, and a whole lot of episodes that have nothing to do with those arcs, but there is no single narrative. There isn’t a single cohesive narrative to Gintama. So, does the anime manage to stay entertaining for that long, or even be entertaining at all? Let’s take a peek and find out.
From 2006 to 2010, Sunrise, the same studio behind the Gundam franchise, did an anime adaptation which lasted for just over 200 episodes. Gintama is an ongoing manga by Sorachi Hideaki.
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